I unhooked my feet in the sudden quiet. Shadows had stolen across the gully, swallowing the boys whole. I was alone, a long way from home. The weight of the day’s events and the threat of the Kapernickys suddenly seemed too much to bear on my own.
‘Wait!’ I screamed into the onrushing darkness.
The pale disk of a face flickered back at me. Then another and another. I felt a rush of gratitude as I ran, five faint beacons fixed on me, the night snatching at the echoes of my cry.
Wait for me!
chapter 2
‘Have you all cleaned your teeth?’
If Mum was onto the before-school checklist, it must be 8.15 precisely.
‘Yup.’
‘Yes.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Nearly.’
‘Yep.’
‘Affirmative.’ That Wart had been watching way too much Dr Who and the Daleks lately.
‘Got your lunch? Water bottle? Shoes all on?’
We never wore shoes. Except to church, and once a week, on Wednesdays, for uniform day. Then we walked to the bus stop, took them off, stuffed them in the bread drum and caught the bus to school. In the afternoon, we grabbed them out of the bread drum and walked home.
‘I hope you kids had those shoes on all day,’ was the first thing Mum would say when we walked in.
‘Yes, Mum,’ we would all chorus, tossing them at the front door. ‘Just took them off in the bus on the way home.’
That’s why we needed an escape clause in Confession. Apart from Wart, most kids I knew could lie for a living. Speaking for myself, I could lie for Australia if they ever made it an Olympic sport. The only thing holding me back was the guilt.
‘Make sure you’re nice to those Kapernicky girls today.’
I stopped in my tracks, half out the door, the screen propped open with my bum, my cast dangling at my side.
‘Me? What about Punk? Doesn’t he have to be nice to them too? Or can he can do whatever he wants because he’s a boy?’
‘Both of you. Be nice. And it’s not a request. They’re our neighbours now. I want you on good terms with them.’
She had already finished the washing up and was drying the big saucepan she’d boiled a dozen eggs in for breakfast. The glint in her eye said I’d be doing it for a week if I argued.
I exhaled Yes, Mum in a bored monotone that got me the rest of the way out the door with only a cross look.
I had kicked gravel halfway up the driveway by the time she remembered her usual ‘Wait for your brothers!’
I didn’t need to be told twice and bolted for the bread drum as a flurry of boys burst out the back door.
I was on top of the forty-four-gallon drum, working out my angst and how best to avoid the Kapernickys, when Punk arrived with the little boys in tow. Big Hairs slouched past, his port under his arm, to the high school bus stop further up the road.
I’d coaxed the big drum into a reluctant rocking action with some determined footwork and had built up enough momentum to get it rolling from one lip of the ditch to the other.
Punk didn’t muck around. ‘Hop off and give me a go.’
‘Like hell. I’m the king of the castle.’
I should have known better than to ignore the one clear warning I was going to get.
Next thing, I was on the ground, seeing stars again, and Punk’s loopy grin loomed over me.
‘No, I’m the King of the Castle and you’re –’
‘Sis!’ Wart turned pale. ‘Your leg!’
The skin on my shin had split in a jagged slash. Something white glistened then disappeared as a thick slug of blood welled out of the gash and crawled down my leg. Punk was the first to speak.
‘Bus’s coming.’
Sweat erupted from my pores, but all I could think was that Mum would kill me if I missed the bus.
I hobbled across the road and lined up silently with my brothers, biggest to littlest. Lick, as usual, copped the snake-ridden dead grass in the roadside ditch while Punk and I shared the council-slashed shoulder of the road.
Our right as biggest.
Mr O’Driscoll, the headmaster, took one look and phoned Mum. She made it up to the school before the bell had even rung.
‘It’s a shocking gash, Mrs Vanderbomm. Honestly, I don’t think she’ll ever wear hot pants again.’
I blinked furiously, breathing through my mouth. I am twelve years old. I could easily live another seventy years. That’s a long time without hot pants.
Even Mum looked a bit startled at the news.
I shot a dark look at Punk loitering near the taps, my heart thumping as the talk turned to hospitals and stitches.
That’s twice in two days. If I don’t do something soon, he’s going to kill me outright.
Aileen Kapernicky and her sister Janeen watched silently from the swings as Mum carried my school bag out to the car.
Thanks to Punk, I’d avoided them for another day.
Eight black spiders crawled down my leg.
The hospital doctor smiled at the look on my face.
‘Don’t worry, it’s neat, where it counts. We’ll pull those out in a week or so. Go home and have the rest of the day off.’
That hardly ever happened. After having six kids in as many years, Mum wasn’t into spending school days with us. Chickenpox, mumps and measles were the only things that ever got anyone a day off school in this family.
We celebrated my infirmity by making jam drops for afternoon tea. Mum’s finger made really big jam craters in the top of the biscuit dough so I made a mental note to eat hers and leave the ones dimpled by my little finger for the boys.
While they were baking, Mum moved onto the vacuuming, sucking up the black beetles that pooled nightly in front of our twelve-inch black and white television set.
I settled into reading Jane Eyre on the couch. But then Mum started on about it being nice for me, having some girls living next door for a change, so I invented a headache and slipped into my room.
It was dark and airless, in the dead centre of the house, with a single window that opened onto the enclosed verandah where the five boys slept. Perfect for escaping into another world.
A battery of bags and boots thumping onto the floor woke me at 3.30.
The boys were swarming over Mum’s jam drops when I wandered out, picking lint out of my pigtails. I had just palmed a couple of Mum’s finest when Punk spotted me and started spitting biscuit crumbs across the bench.
‘I’m going to kill you, Sis!’
‘What for?’ Fatlump pushed in between us. ‘Taking all the ones with lots of jam?’
‘You half-killed me this morning, you flog. I haven’t done anything to you!’
He stabbed a half-eaten jam drop in my face. ‘O’Dribble caned me because of you!’
‘WHAT? What for?’
‘He said I’d scarred you for life and he called me up off parade and gave me six of the best in front of the whole school!’
Fatlump took advantage of my open-mouthed shock and grabbed a jammy biscuit out of my hand and swapped it for a sad little red wink in oversized dough.
‘Yeah, well, that’s not my fault. Why don’t you kill O’Dribble?’
We both grabbed another fistful of jam drops and glowered at each other across the tray.
It hadn’t occurred to me to call in reinforcements in the on-again-off-again battle with Punk, and a headmaster was an unlikely ally at the best of times. A surprise attack by an armed and dangerous headmaster … well, that ranked alongside locust plagues: clearly an act of God.
I was trying to weigh up whether a good flogging was equal to, or greater than, permanent disfigurement, when Mum called out from the washing line.
‘Only two each, and put the others away for lunches tomorrow.’
She had baked twenty-four jam drops. There were two broken ones left on the plate.
Big Hairs scattered bodies in all directions as he fronted the bench. ‘I’ll put them away.’
chapter 3
The school jungle gym’s interlinked scaffolding of hollow piping was the perfect setting for trying to work through a problem. And I had a big one. Mum wasn’t going to let me off the Kapernicky hook no matter how much I wiggled and whined.
‘Just be nice,’ she said. ‘And if you can’t manage that on your own, I’ll invite them for a visit and show you how to do it myself.’
The idea appalled me. The Kapernickys were strangers. Older than me. And girls.
We just weren’t set up for girls at our place. Both my dolls were missing in action: blinded by Fatlump when I had the measles and was too weak to defend them, then scalped by me and Punk during a bloodthirsty re-enactment of the Saturday movie matinee.
I’d never had a girl over. I wouldn’t know what to do with one. It wouldn’t work. It was crazy.
I climbed obsessively over, under, into and through the jungle gym’s interconnected maze of hollow piping, worrying at the problem like a dog with a bone.
Why couldn’t Mum just get off my case?
I hadn’t been horrible to the Kapernickys. I hadn’t been anything at all to them. Not to their faces anyway.
Punk and I were just playing, for Pete’s sake. Two trips to the doctor on, I wasn’t even sure who started it. The whys and wherefores seemed shrouded in darkness. It was always the way, when there was more than one of us at fault.
We’d egg each other on to some new stupidity that probably wouldn’t have occurred to us on our own. Then, when Mum tried to cast some light on why our behaviour degenerated when we were together, reason just seemed to scuttle further into the shadows. In the cold light of day, I couldn’t explain it.
So Mum had decided that if we couldn’t act responsibly when we were together, then we’d have to start working on the concept of ‘individual responsibility’.
But if I was the test case, it was destined to fail.
I didn’t want to be friends with the Kapernickys any more than they wanted to be friends with me. I just couldn’t go where Mum wanted; couldn’t back down from my own conviction that there was something wrong with them, not me.
They were the icky ones. Why was Mum blaming me?
I hung upside down from the jungle gym, caught like a fly in a metal web, my plait wisping a trail in the dust as I searched for a way out.
Most of the boys in the school were playing down the oval. Lick and Fatlump fielded boundaries out the back, the only Grade Ones not playing tiggy. Punk let them play cricket with the big boys as long as they promised not to bawl when they got out. Wart was at fine leg: he had a good pair of hands for a Fourth Grader.
The girls pretty much divided into class groups with the One-to-Fours hopscotching on the parade ground and bouncing beam balls in the undercroft. Of the five girls in Five/Six/Seven, I was the only Grade Sixer, hanging like a dag out of a sheep’s bum, from the jungle gym.
Valda and Jenny Sykes, the identical twins in Year Seven, swung in lazy loops from the monkey bars, the perfect sisterly unit, complete in themselves and difficult to divide. They didn’t need company; they had it built in. Trying to fall into step with them usually ended up as awkward as a three-legged race.
Then there were the Kapernickys.
‘Be nice,’ Mum said.
But it was harder than she thought.
Janeen sat alone on one of the swings next to the teacher’s house, dark hair curtaining her face as she rocked from heel to toe. Her chin drooped towards the swelling front of her T-shirt.
She must have missed some school somewhere because she was nearly fourteen and only just finishing Year Seven. Tall and dark and so quiet you could look right past her without even noticing that anyone was there.
She didn’t look at people. Didn’t look for anyone either, like some kids did, rubber-necking and grinning until someone came up and talked to them. The swing sat empty beside her, so maybe she wanted to be left alone.
Her sister cartwheeled in big lazy circles across the dead grass. Aileen’s hair had been shorn into a sharpie cut at the front and over the ears, the long mullet at the back billowing into a tangle of dusty curls as she spun. Over and over. Round and round. No fear. No hesitation. Trusting the dirt under her hands, the rotation of her body through space.
I couldn’t do that. Defy gravity. Release the sureness of the earth beneath my feet, trust I’d find it again, upside down and disoriented.
She took off at a run and launched into a flying cartwheel that rounded off with both feet hitting the ground together.
Flaming show-off.
She was the year below me, but a year older; as tall as me, but muscled and, man, was she developed. Through the thin T-shirt I could see everything – swelling, stretching and heaving through the arc of the cartwheel.
The strong legs circled round and thumped to the ground in front of me, flicking dust into my eyes.
Be nice.
‘What are you staring at, Vanderbum?’
I flipped onto my feet and fronted a pair of dark, angry eyes. Words popped out of my mouth into the heat shimmering between us.
‘You should wear a bra, Kapernicky.’
She took a step towards me, breathing heavily, but I held my ground. Having five brothers had taught me that much.
A decision clicked behind her eyes, just as a loud clanging distracted us both.
Mr O’Driscoll must have been psychic. He emerged from the undercroft, swinging the bell high overhead, his eyes fixed on us.
I stalked off, answering the call to class.
‘-ness means state of being; -less means without.’
The sun blow-torched the tin roof over our heads while our Five/Six/Seven class panted like puppies over prefixes and suffixes.
‘-ness means state of being; -less means without.’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a stash of dead flies under Aileen Kapernicky’s chair.
‘-ness means state of being; -less means without…’
A fly landed on her cheek and instead of waving it away, she slapped at it. Hot eyes fixed on me, she dragged the stunned fly down her face to the jawbone and plucked it off. Then she rolled it between her fingers for a drawn-out moment before flicking it away.
I flinched as it whizzed past my cheek.
‘Now, who can give me an example of a word using the state of being suffix?’
My hand went up.
‘Disgustingness, Sir.’ I carefully kept my eyes away from Aileen Kapernicky. ‘The state of being disgusting.’
Mr O’Driscoll looked as though the heat was getting to him.
‘Cecilia, you can do better than that. Repulsiveness might be the word you were looking for. Vileness, perhaps. Anyway, for homework you can all write down ten words using the suffix -ness, meaning state of being.’
He paused, wiping sweat from his glazed brow.
‘Now, how about -less meaning without? Any suggestions?’
Punk surprised me by shooting up his hand. ‘Sir! She’s an example –’ He pointed at me. ‘She’s Sisless – without sisters.’
Mr O’Driscoll liked to regain control by balancing on his toes. He had the whole class trained to stop laughing as soon as his hands went behind his back and his heels rose more than a couple of inches from the floor.
‘Yes, well, I’m sure you will all be able to come up with ten better suggestions than that by tomorrow morning.’
Aileen Kapernicky leaned over as Mr O’Driscoll turned back to the blackboard.
‘How about gutless?’ she hissed, eyes drilling into me.
I kept my voice matter-of-fact. ‘Or brainless. That would fit.’
I could almost hear the click of an escape hatch closing.
I had made an enemy.
One that would be hard to avoid in a classroom of eighteen kids and a school of less than fifty.
chapter 4
I perched on the fuel tank, arms wrapped round my knees, a s
afe distance from our three-bedroom fibro and its tight-lipped matriarch.
Mum didn’t want to hear that Aileen Kapernicky had started it. That she was looking for a fight. That I didn’t do anything. She was going to invite them over, she said. Make us sort it out.
I stared mutinously at my filthy feet and was swamped by a sudden furious revulsion.
Dust was an annoying constant in my life. But in my present mood, it had moved beyond irritating to infuriating. And around here, that was like saying the air was unbearable. Or the sunshine. Or something else omnipresent. Like, I don’t know, dust, or something.
I swiped a hand across the arch of my foot, my gorge rising at the contact with the layer of fine grit. I forced it down, a ball of anger constricting my chest.
This place was disgusting with dust. It was everywhere. Gravity had totally lost its grip on the problem.
It hung like gauze in the sunlight, rising in waves from the scorched earth, clinging to my lips and teeth, suffocating me with its presence.
It churned around the car as Mum drove off to get the mail, roaring like a dragon’s breath out of the Little Shed where she had parked.
Over at the Big Shed it swirled in lazy willy-willies, puffing at the boys’ heels as they trotted off to the dairy. Across the gully, it shot out in great jet streams in the tractor’s wake, hanging in hazy mirages over the paddocks, raising every hair on my neck.
No farmer’s daughter should find dust such a trial.
It wasn’t that I minded walking in it so much. I could even take it – repulsive as it was – coating my feet in grungy slippers. What I just couldn’t cope with was the feeling of rubbing one gritty foot up against the other.
I liked to rub feet. I rubbed feet the way other people twirled their hair, or sucked their thumb, or bit their fingernails, or even, as much as I hated to admit it, slapped at flies. It was a comforting habit: sliding one foot over the other, back and forth, under and over. But with a raspy layer of grit in between, it turned into a nerve-jangling form of torture.
Why was it so hard to remember not to rub feet together?
Dust Page 2